Lying to Others
I don’t really remember exactly when I caught my ex-husband’s first lie, but I do remember as time went on and I got to know him better I noticed that from time to time he would exaggerate when telling stories (if the fish was one foot long it must have been two feet long). He would also occasionally tell a truthful story but then include items that were an all-out lie (if he visited one city in a state that allowed him to say he had visited any other city in that state). It appeared to me that some of the lying he did was to make himself look better, such as telling people that he owned part of a business when he did not (a complete lie). In the beginning of our marriage, I would try to gently correct the discrepancies right away when I noticed him making them, and I made up excuses in my mind to deal with his inaccurate storytelling to others such as maybe he forgot the story details or was tired and made a mistake. Surely, he was not doing this on purpose, I thought at first, but as he continued I thought different. Later in our marriage, not wanting to get into an argument with my ex-husband about his lying, I would become embarrassed and walk away from conversations. From seeing how often he lied, I had learned to not believe anything he said if I could not verify it by other means, especially if what he said seemed too good to be true.
Lying to Me
Along with my ex-husband’s lies to others, he also lied to me on many occasions. I remember one time when I was looking for some of my magazines and writings I had left on the floor on my side of the bed (at the time I had no nightstand) and asked him if he had done something with them. He said he had not seen them, but later that day I found all the missing items in the trash. He didn’t like clutter, so I guess he threw away my stuff to clean the room.
One particular lie my ex-husband told me stands out in my mind, not necessarily because it was calculated, but because of how and when he told me about the lie. Towards the end of our marriage my ex-husband worked from home for a company, and I worked outside the home. My ex-husband would tell me he worked hard all day every day that he worked out of the house and that he had to continue working late into the evening. Fast forward to the divorce when he decided to tell me that he had been lying to me: during the time he was saying he was working from home, he would often go golfing in the afternoons and return to our house before I got home from work. I still remember the way he smiled and laughed at me in delight when he told me this. He was proud he had pulled the wool over my eyes and duped me for such a long time. When he mentioned this during our divorce, I felt that he was making fun of me, and I speculated that he wanted to hurt me psychologically, but by that point in time I had already been reading everything I could get my hands on about psychopathy. Learning about psychopathic behaviors and traits helped me to put into perspective some of the disturbing behaviors my ex-husband displayed, including lying. This new perspective helped me to dampen my habitual thinking, that in some way I was at fault for his bad treatment of me, that I must have been doing something wrong, and that maybe I could have positively influenced him in some way, among other things. Being free from much of this internal dialogue allowed me to remain nonreactive and avoid getting hooked into his demands and abuse. That is what helped me to make sense of the situation I was in and remain nonreactive to his duping delight.
Written by a Survivor
